


After The End

by Morgyn Leri (morgynleri)



Series: The Travel Collection: Drabbles, Snippets, and Supershorts [78]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, GFY
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 21:03:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1085672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morgynleri/pseuds/Morgyn%20Leri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus can coax her to eat a little soup some days, can convince her to drink water or lemonade most, but even he can't get her out of bed. He doesn't even try - he's seen her try to be the stone on which all her family and friends might anchor for too long.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After The End

Niobe curls in the center of her bed, unmoving as she has been for weeks. Remus can coax her to eat a little soup some days, can convince her to drink water or lemonade most, but even he can't get her out of bed. He doesn't even try - he's seen her try to be the stone on which all her family and friends might anchor for too long. Seen the cracks that have spread, and is little surprised the death of her sister and disappearance of her daughter have left her shattered.

He will hope they find Isis - suspects she's vanished of her own accord, not because someone's taken her - soon, and that will help Niobe find her center again. They've already burned Grace, and for all that she had become Fenrir's creature to the core, she had still been Niobe's sister, her younger twin, and an essential part of her life even in absence for so long.

Harry comes up sometimes, to curl up on the bed next to Niobe, holding onto her hand like a lifeline, talking constantly about anything he can think of that isn't death and destruction. Trying to coax the woman he's called mother into a response, and getting little for his efforts.

Miriam doesn't even bother to try, but she's busily trying to patch together the rest of the family that's built up around Niobe, and trying to find Isis. Trying to find her granddaughter, and to bring her home, which is all she can do for Niobe.

Sirius has tried coming up to annoy Niobe, but the door had simply slammed in his face, and Niobe hadn't moved. Although that's a sign of something other than apathy, and Remus had very nearly asked Sirius to keep coming, to see if he could needle Niobe into more than a bit of wordless, wandless magic. Except Remus can't ask that of Sirius, not when Sirius is trying so hard to figure out how to live a life that isn't that of prisoner or fugative.

Everyone else is doing the same, trying to put their lives back together now that Voldemort is dead. Some of them visit - Draco, Pansy, Millicent, Hermione, Fred and George - even if they're visiting more for Harry than anything else. Tonks all but lives in the house, when she and Harry aren't spending the day (or night) at her flat or her parents' house. There will be a wedding before too long, Remus hopes.

He wishes there could be two, but without Snape's body, Niobe isn't free, and he knows if Snape shows up alive, she won't break the contract, for all that she hates her husband and his choices.

So his life revolves around Niobe for now, save for the night of the full moon, when he retreats to the well-constructed room in the basement that he knows had been Grace's as a child, and Miriam has finally allowed to be his. She had barred him from the house on full moons before the end of the war, but now, she lets him stay, a salve to her own grief.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt "Grief".
> 
> Originally posted as part of [The Travel Collection](http://archiveofourown.org/works/439754), in the chapter [A Cloak of Mourning](http://archiveofourown.org/works/439754/chapters/2183507).
> 
>  
> 
> **Original Characters for this story/AU:**
> 
>  
> 
> Niobe Avery - one of the titular characters of The Avery Women AU. The older of the two sisters, and a woman who spends her life trying to be everything that she thinks she is supposed to be.


End file.
